Due to some requests by some German OpenStreetMap contributors, here a German blogpost about the results of the article: “The Street Network Evolution of Crowdsourced Maps: OpenStreetMap in Germany 2007–2011.” By Pascal Neis, Dennis Zielstra & Alexander Zipf. 2012. Future Internet 4, no. 1: 1-21. (doi:10.3390/fi4010001) Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/4/1/1/

Bemerkung: Im Folgenden sind ausgewählte Ergebnisse und Diagramme aus dem englischen Artikel dargestellt/zusammengefasst. Bei weiterem Interesse bitte das Original Journal Paper lesen. Es beinhaltet bei weitem mehr Informationen und Abbildungen!

Das OpenStreetMap (OSM) Projekt ist das bekannteste Projekt im Bereich Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Weltweit beteiligen sich mehrere hundert tausend Mitglieder um Informationen für eine „freie“ Geodatenbank zu sammeln. Der Zuwachs der Daten ist weltweit recht heterogen, Deutschland zählt aber global zu eine der aktivsten Länder und die Anzahl der Projektbeteiligten steigt von Jahr zu Jahr. Aktuell (Juni 2011) haben insgesamt mehr als 40000 unterschiedliche Mitglieder zum Deutschland Datensatz beigetragen. Wie in der folgenden Abbildung zu sehen, haben unterschiedliche Mengen von Mitgliedern, die drei OSM Objektarten (Node, Way & Relation) in Deutschland erzeugt. Eine weitere wichtige Information ist in der Abbildung ebenfalls zu sehen: 98% der Punkte wurden von ca. 8500 Mitgliedern, 98% der Linien von ca. 7500 und 98% der Relations auf ca. 2600 Mitglieder generiert (wenn man den letzten Eigentümer als Ersteller bewertet).

(c) MDPI

In folgender Abbildung ist die Entwicklung des Gesamtstraßennetzes für Deutschland für die vergangenen vier Jahre (2007-2011) zu sehen. Die vielen unterschiedlichen Straßenkategorien wurden aus Übersichtsgründen und für bessere Untersuchungs- und Vergleichsmethoden in vier Gruppen zusammengefasst (Autobahn/Schnellstraßen, Kreisstraße/Gemeidestraße, Straßen an/in Wohngebieten und sonstige wie Service oder Feld-/Waldwege).

(c) MDPI

Verfolgt man den Wachstum der unterschiedlichen Kategorien, ist zu erkennen, dass ab einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt manche Kategorien nicht mehr weiter zunehmen. Daraus lässt sich ableiten, ab wann eine Kategorie annährend „komplett“ erfasst gewesen sein dürfte oder wo noch neue Straßen hinzukommen. Bei diesem ersten Vergleich ist aber folgendes zu beachten: Der Datensatz von TomTom eignet sich nur für einen Vergleich des Wegenetzes für die Autonavigation (also drei der vier Kategorien). Die Kategorie „Sonstige Wege“kann nur bedingt im Vergleich berücksichtigt werden. In der vierten Kategorie hat OSM ein bereits viel höheres Wegenetz als der kommerzielle Anbieter. Basierend auf den eben erwähnten Annahmen und dem Vergleich mit den TomTom Kategoriestraßenlängen kommen wir zu folgenden Ergebnissen:

1. Autobahnen/Schnellstraßen waren bereits Mitte 2008 komplett erfasst
2. Mitte 2009 waren Kreisstraßen/Gemeindestraßen in Deutschland erfasst
3. Straßen in/an Wohngebieten sind noch nicht vollständig erfasst
4. Ende 2009 hatte OSM bereits mehr „Sonstige Wege“ als der kommerzielle Datensatz von TomTom
5. In der Gesamtsumme des Wegenetzes hat OSM seit Mitte 2010 TomTom übertroffen. Wobei hier sicherlich die vielen Feld- und Waldwege für OSM ein Vorteil sind.
6. Aktuell (Juni 2011) wird in OSM Deutschland größtenteils nur noch vereinzelt am Wegennetz an und in Wohngebieten und vermehrt am sonstigen Wegenetz gearbeitet (Wald-, Wiesen- und Feldwegen).

Die Entwicklung der einzelnen Straßenkategorien im Vergleich zum TomTom Datensatz ist in der folgenden Abbildung zu sehen.

(c) MDPI

Damit hat sich in Deutschland aktuell (Juni 2011) das OSM Straßennetz für die Autonavigation bis auf 9% an vergleichbare Datensätze herangearbeitet und besitzt im Bereich des Gesamtwegenetzes sogar über 27% mehr Informationen. Durch den aktuellen Zuwachs in den fehlenden Straßenkategorien dürfte OSM die noch offene Differenz im Straßennetz bis Mitte/Ende 2012 ausgleichen.

Neben dem Wegenetz wurden auch die Gesamtzahlen der Abbiegevorschriften pro Straßenkategorie miteinander verglichen.

(c) MDPI

Wie im oberen Bild zu sehen ist, ist die Differenz zwischen TomTom und OSM nicht gering. Damit sind aktuell mehr als fünfmal so viele Abbiegevorschriften bei TomTom für Deutschland verfügbar im Vergleich zu OSM. Die Anzahl von Abbiegevorschriften steigt zwar stetig bei OSM, trotzdem dürfte es vermutlich nach jetzigem Stand und Zuwachs noch mehrere Jahre dauern bis OSM hier aufschließen kann.

Der komplette (englische) Artikel mit weiteren Untersuchungen und Abbildungen ist hier kostenfrei herunterladbar: http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/4/1/1/

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Really great news for all our non-European OpenStreetMap.org Mappers: Since last month, the OSM Routing View is available for the whole world. You can read more in Frederik’s blog post. Yesterday he sent me the latest results of the view and I did some analysis with it. To all new readers: you can find more information about the OSM Inspector (OSMI) here. The Routing View within the OSMI “shows problems in the data, related to routing and navigation” (direct link).

However, here are the new *worldwide* stats for November 2011: we have a total of about 1,3 Mio errors. We can divide them into the following groups:

• Unconnected 1 meter: 248000
• Unconnected 2 meter: 62000
• Unconnected 5 meter: 170000
• Duplicate (number of duplicate segments): 833000

The following diagram shows the amount of errors per continent:

In the following charts you can see the amount of errors separated by country and the amount of errors in detail per country for “Europe”:

*NEW*: All other non-European countries with more then 5000 errors are listed in the following chart:

The “big three” countries with the highest amount of errors are in the last chart:

As you can see it in the charts, especially the United States need a lot of work. Furthermore it seems that in Ethiopia something went wrong. Was there any data-import or something similar? Frederik does not have a sponsor for running this routing view world-wide on a daily basis right now, so please contact him if you would support us! The last Routing View blog post is online here.

thx @ *Fab*

The last unmapped places analysis for OpenStreetMap that I conducted is nearly eight months ago. So I figured it was about time to create a new one. You can read in the last blog post how my algorithm exactly works.

However, at the moment (Nov. 4th. 2011) we have (according to the Geofabrik extract) about 597 000 entries in OSM for places that are located within “Europe“. This means we have an overall increase of about 90 000 places within the past eight months. We can separate them into several types with different values:

• City: 1093 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 1055 ; +3.6%)
• Town: 16213 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 16106 ; +0.7%)
• Suburb: 29642 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 24913 ; +19.0%)
• Village: 301638 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 278691 ; +8.2%)
• Hamlet: 238717 (as of March 11th, 2011 it was 184326 ; 29.5%)
• Isolated dwelling: 9064 (new in my stats)

The results showed that of the total 301638 village entries for Europe in the database, about 154445 (51%) (in March 2011 it was 55%) have not been detected or mapped yet. Further it is possible that the places are tagged incorrectly (e.g. villages vs. hamlet). Anyway, the following figures show the distribution of the values for each country (in different scales).

It is nice to see, that Austria (-688), Czech Republic (-633), France (-1978), Georgia (-721), Germany (-1192), Italy (-926), Poland (-2364), Spain (-1472) and the United Kingdom (-829) were able to reduce their “unmapped places” in a quite solid way. As usual you can find my results as a GPX-overlay here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org

(Remarks for http://resultmaps.neis-one.org: Not each and every country is available as an overlay. Some countries such as France or Poland showed longer browser loading times to display the GPX-overlays!)

UPDATE: Download the complete GPX-files of this analysis here.

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Most of you might already know that the OpenStreetMap project will celebrate its 7th Anniversary this month. Several events will take place on Saturday, 20 August 2011 at different locations around the world! You can read more about it here.

A small gift that I would like to contribute is a website which allows you to get some information about your “OSM-Age“. The functionality is similar to “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?“. Type in your or any other OSM username and your or the corresponding user’s OSM-Birthday will be displayed. To be more specific the website will show your OSM-Age and your rank within the OSM contributors list. Remember: Not every OSM member contributed to OSM (cf. „Nominal Members“ of OSM). So it is possible that your rank is better than you might have expected. The date of a user’s birthday was collected from each users OSM User Wiki page (“Mapper since: …”).

The following image shows an example search result:

Additionally you can find the oldest and newest contributors in the boxes below the search results. Further you can see whose birthday it is on that specific day, or within the previous or following three days.

Soooo, what is your birthday? Check it out here: http://osmbirthday.neis-one.org

Additional information: Today (Aug. 2011) the OSM project has about 143 000 contributors with at least one edit in the database. Remember that officially the project has over 446 000 registered members (cf. OpenStreetMap stats report). I will announce more about this topic here in my blog in the near future … so stay tuned! Or you can read the blog post from last year (2010): „Nominal Members“ of OSM

thx @ *Fab* for the user-interface
and thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

One of the many bottle necks of today’s web services are network latency and bandwidth. While I was working on a research paper, I recognized that G**gle encodes some information when you calculate a route on G**gle Maps. This process reduces, besides the gzip compression, the response from the server. This means that this is a speed improvement for the server client communication besides the zoom-level-generalization. You can read more about the “Encoded Polyline Algorithm Format” and how it works here.

We integrated this nice feature into the code of the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) project. The following table shows a few results for some sample routes comparing the old and the new file sizes (@ zoomlevel 18):

And if you are not a numbers person, let us put this in perspective: The fast routes just got faster! And that’s not all. As a second new feature the web frontend of the OSRM has shortlinks for the calculated route now. You can find the link of your route at the route summary. Try it out here: http://map.project-osrm.org/

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂

First of all, sorry that I did not create a new stat regarding the Routing View past month. To all the new readers: Usually I create an analysis about the Routing View of the OpenStreetMap Inspector for each month for Europe. You can find more information about the OSM Inspector (OSMI) here. The Routing View within the OSMI “shows problems in the data related to routing and navigation”. You can read more about it here … A direkt link to the OSMI Routing View is here!

However, here are the new stats for May, 2011: we have a total of about 124000 “Unconnected Roads” and about 108000 “Duplicate Ways” (number of duplicate segments). Overall this means that we have about 17000 *new* „Unconnected Roads” errors and only ca. 1300 “Duplicate Ways” have been fixed in Europe. For the past three months we have an increment of about 2850000 new OSM way segments for routing. (May 7th: 34500000, February 20th: 31700000, January 20th: 30600000)

In the following images you can see the amount of errors divided by country and the amount of errors in detail per country for “Europe”:

For this month only a few countries were able to reduce their errors. France (-2200) and Poland (-4800) are ahead of everyone else, so Poland this is your month 🙂 Here you can find the February stat of the OSMI Routing View. Hopefully this is going to be better in the next month :S …

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂

Kate created some editing stats for OpenStreetMap Japan last Thursday. You can find her blog post here: “Quick Japan Editing Stats for OpenStreetMap”

During the creation of the layers for the “Road Status in Japan”, I log some editing information of OpenStreetMap too. As I mentioned in my blog post, I use the Geofabrik extracts for Japan (Sendai region only). They have the following bounding box (thx Frederik):

polygon 1 1.412259E+02 3.663895E+01 1.427964E+02 4.038643E+01 1.411296E+02 4.038351E+01 1.394639E+02 3.665750E+01 1.412259E+02 3.663895E+01 END END

And here are several diagrams of the editing in Japan (Sendai region only):

In numbers (March 20th, 2011 12:50):

• Overall amount of OSM Nodes: 5138123
• Overall amount of OSM Ways: 149978
• Overall amount of Highways: 47156
• Number of Barrier Nodes: 528
• Impassable Ways: 463
• Number of Users (Contributors): 308
• Length of OSM Ways [km]: 29049,71
• Length of impassable Ways [km]: 222,58

thx @ Dennis and best of luck for tomorrow!

[Update #1 – March 25th, 2011 21.00] – I have updated all diagrams above !

• Overall amount of OSM Nodes: 5258135
• Overall amount of OSM Ways: 169557
• Overall amount of Highways: 59120
• Number of Barrier Nodes: 549
• Impassable Ways: 801
• Number of Users (Contributors): 414
• Tsunami:Damage Polygons: 608
• Length of OSM Ways [km]: 32408,75
• Length of impassable Ways [km]: 371,67

[Update #2 – April 08th, 2011] – I have updated all diagrams above !

• Overall amount of OSM Nodes: 6304539
• Overall amount of OSM Ways: 271768
• Overall amount of Highways: 150556
• Number of Barrier Nodes: 597
• Impassable Ways: 879
• Number of Users (Contributors): 435
• Tsunami:Damage Polygons: 622
• Length of OSM Ways [km]: 58700,66
• Length of impassable Ways [km]: 387,60

My last blog post about “Unmapped Places in Europe” was read by more then 800 people. So I think it’s time to redo the analyses a second time after three months. At the moment (March 11th, 2011) we have (according to the Geofabrik extract) 505091 places in OpenStreetmap Europe. They can be separated into the following place-types:

• city=1055 (as of Dec. 5th, 2010 it was 1045 -> +1%)
• town=16106 (as of Dec. 5th, 2010 it was 16032 -> +0.5%)
• suburb=24913 (as of Dec. 5th, 2010 it was 23563 -> +6%)
• village=278691 (as of Dec. 5th, 2010 it was 271147 -> +3%)
• hamlet=184326 (as of Dec. 5th, 2010 it was 165804 -> +11%)

During my last and also during this analysis I *only* used those places that had a corresponding “village”-value. My tool works so far as followed:

1. Get only places with a village-tag.
2. Search nearby (ca. 600m distance) for a street with one of the following highway-types: residential, service, living_street, cycleway, footway, pedestrian, steps or platform.
3. If no street can be found, mark the place as “unmapped”!

Why did I only use villages? Well for the case of Germany it can be assumed that places with “higher” place-type tags such as “town” or “city” have already been mapped.

What are the “false=positives” and why is your village marked as unmapped? A village should usually have at least one of the roads mentioned above otherwise the place should be mapped as a hamlet. Would you agree with this?

The results showed that of the total 278691 villages, about 152337 (55%) (in Dec. 2010 it was 58%) who are located within “Europe”, have not been detected or mapped yet. The following diagram shows the distribution of the numbers by country.

YAY, Germany!!!

The results can again be displayed as a GPX-overlay on a map which can be found here http://resultmaps.neis-one.org :

(Remarks for http://resultmaps.neis-one.org: Not each and every country is available as an overlay. Some countries such as France, Poland and Ukraine showed longer browser loading times to display the GPX-overlays!)

thx @ Dennis

My last blog post about the growing agreement to the new CTs is now nearly three months ago. Time for a short update: During the aforementioned time frame, about 32 contributors accepted the new CTs every day. Overall this means that since October 21 2010 there are about 43 contributors each day who accepted the new CTs. I updated my diagram with the latest numbers:

In December I conducted an analysis about the “Change of OSM object numbers through relicensing”. This time I only declared the last modifier of an OSM object (node/way/relation) as the owner of the object! The last and the new results can be seen in the following diagrams:

In my OSM-user-database of March 9th, 2011 a total of 120456* members are the “owners” of the following OSM objects (* Notice: Not every member of the OSM project (>350000 members) has contributed!):

• Number of nodes: 1007604532
• Number of ways: 85365727
• Number of relations: 899145

As of March 9th, 2011, 8124 Users have accepted the new license. 35678 new OSM members (uid >= 286582) have accept the new contributor terms automatically. I created the following numbers of OSM objects, which will be available for relicensing (if you assume that the last modifier is the owner of the object):

• Number of nodes: 801700665 (79,56%) (as of Dec. 15th, 2010 it was 66,52%)
• Number of ways: 66236798 (77,59%) (as of Dec. 15th, 2010 it was 61,68%)
• Number of relations: 716130 (79,65%) (as of Dec. 15th, 2010 it was 62,14%)

Are you still interested in any analysis regarding this topic?

thx @ Dennis

[Update – March 24th, 2011]
The following diagramm shows the above numbers of March 9th, 2011 in percent:

This month I tried something new. But first we will start with the usual monthly stats of the OSM Inspector Routing for Europe, this time for the middle of February 2011. Overall the following amount of errors appears for “Europe”: Unconnected Roads: ca. 107000 and Duplicate Ways (number of duplicate segments): ca. 109000 (in the OSM Wiki you can find more information about the error-types). This means that altogether there are 2600 unconnected streets and 16900 duplicate way segment errors have been fixed. In total we have an increment of 1111000 new OSM way segments for routing during the past 4 weeks in Europe (01/20/2011: 30600000, 02/20/2011: 31710000).

The following image shows the amount of errors divided by country for today’s Europe OpenStreetMap dataset:

In the past month several other countries were able to reduce the amount of errors, such as in: France (-1600), Italy (-1600), Poland (-1900), Sweden (-2300) and United Kingdom (-8000!!!). So congratulation to the UK, this is your month 🙂

Now let’s take a look at the new diagram: The following image shows the amount of errors per 100 km OpenStreetMap streetnetwork data for each country.

Do you have any other ideas for additional diagrams? I think dividing the amount of errors for each country by the number of OSM ways or segments could be an interesting approach, what do you think? The last image shows the amount of errors divided by country:

thx @ Dennis